Turi Beach Jetty
A jetty off the island of Batam, Indonesia, where I stayed for a few months once, working on a movie. A continuing source of mystery and inspiration for me.

Kiran Kaur Saini is a Punjabi-American writer of literary and speculative fiction. Her work has been awarded the Henfield Prize for Fiction, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and recommended to the Nebula award reading list. Her stories appear regularly in both speculative and literary journals, including Strange Horizons, Gulf Coast, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Glimmer Train, and Pleiades, have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, and have been selected for inclusion in Best Small Fictions. Kiran’s work has been supported by the North Carolina Council for the Arts, the Speculative Literature Foundation, and the United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County, as well as by fellowship residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Djerassi Fine Arts Work Program, and Blue Mountain Center. She was the Octavia Butler scholar at Clarion West in 2023. Kiran has taught creative writing at University of Louisiana, and she is currently an Associate Editor for Podcastle podcast. A 15-year veteran of the Los Angeles film industry, she stepped away from her career in film production at the start of the pandemic to become a full-time caregiver to her 89-year-old mom.